>> DRIVING THE DAY: How the government shutdown will affect tech, by Serdar Yegulalp: "The general rule of thumb in a shutdown is that if any given government function involves 'the safety of human life and the protection of property,' it'll keep running. But not all government functions that rely on IT (or which IT itself may rely on) fall into that category -- even if common sense and our experiences in IT say otherwise." InfoWorld

>> WHITE HATS 1, BOTNET 0: Symantec seizes part of massive peer-to-peer botnet ZeroAccess, by Lucian Constantin: "ZeroAccess botnet consists of more than 1.9 million infected computers and is used primarily to perform click fraud and Bitcoin mining in order to generate revenues estimated at tens of millions of dollars per year... The cybercriminals behind ZeroAccess, one of the largest botnets in existence, have lost access to more than a quarter of the infected machines they controlled because of an operation executed by security researchers from Symantec." PC World

>> EVERY BRICK IN THE WALL: Facebook expands Graph Search to statuses and posts, by Lauren Hockenson: "While Facebook has worked very hard to perfect real-time news for friends in the Newsfeed and big-picture past events in the Timeline, granular details of past activity on the social media site are very difficult to pick out. Trying to find a specific status message or wall post can involve endless scrolling chronologically through the timeline -- not necessarily the most efficient of methods. But the social media giant has finally solved that today, announcing an expansion of Graph Search to include posts and status updates." GigaOM

>>>> All public Facebook posts ever made are now searchable Ars Technica

>> MICROSOFT MISCHIEF: Through a glass darkly: Microsoft's new financial reporting format, by Juan Carlos Perez: "CIOs will have a harder time evaluating how well key Microsoft products are selling now that the company has restructured the way it breaks down its revenue streams, according to analysts... some see the changes as negative for enterprise IT decision makers, saying CIOs and IT managers will likely struggle making sense of the numbers... The analysts also don't like that the revenue streams of key products like Windows and Office have been bifurcated and mixed in with each other and other products." InfoWorld

>> ALL YOUR BASE: NSA stores metadata of millions of Web users for up to a year, secret files show, by James Ball: "The National Security Agency is storing the online metadata of millions of internet users for up to a year, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency, top secret documents reveal... The Obama administration has repeatedly stated that the NSA keeps only the content of messages and communications of people it is intentionally targeting - but internal documents reveal the agency retains vast amounts of metadata. An introductory guide to digital network intelligence for NSA field agents, included in documents disclosed by former contractor Edward Snowden, describes the agency's metadata repository, codenamed Marina." The Guardian

>>>> Former Qwest CEO out of prison, blames NSA for troubles Network World

>> SECURE MESSAGING: BitTorrent is building a server-free, secure messaging client, by Stan Schroeder: "It's based on distributed technology -- messages are never stored on a server, meaning they're safe from data breaches. Messages are encrypted, and BitTorrent plans to keep the client free and without limits as to how many messages you can send." Mashable

>> SERVING POPOVERS: French national police switch 37,000 desktop PCs to Linux, by Klint Finley: "France's National Gendarmerie -- a national law enforcement agency -- is now running 37,000 desktop PCs with a custom version of the Linux operating system, and by summer of next year, the agency plans to move all 72,000 of its desktop machines to the open source OS... The agency claims the total cost of ownership of Linux and open source applications is about 40 percent less than proprietary software from Microsoft." Wired

>> STAT DU JOUR: Windows Phone surpasses 9% sales across Europe, experiences decline in Italy and China, by Rich Edmonds: "Kantar Worldpanel's latest numbers shows continued rapid growth for Windows Phone sales in European markets, but heavier drops are highlighted in China and Italy... We're looking at positive growth overall, with the US still struggling to take off, but it's not falling... China dropped substantially, taking a hit of 2.6% (YoY)." WP Central

>>>> Microsoft can't even get IT interested in its mobile platform InfoWorld

>> COURTSHIP: Bang With Friends, Zynga kiss and make up, by Philip Michaels: "The company behind Bang With Friends -- the website and mobile app that pretty much promises to help you do what it says on the label -- sent out a statement Monday announcing that it had 'reached an amicable resolution' of a trademark dispute with game maker Zynga." TechHive

>> AT IT AGAIN: John McAfee wants to save us from the NSA, by Robert X. Cringely: "Between posting saucy videos and juggling girlfriends, world's most interesting geek debuts D-Central, an anti-spying device... D-Central, a pocket-sized gizmo he says will prevent the spooks from tapping our phone calls, emails, text messages, and hallucinations... by communicating with smartphones, tablets and other devices, it will create decentralized, floating and moving local networks that can't be penetrated by government spy agencies." InfoWorld

>>>> John McAfee's plan to build a million tiny darknets, foil the NSA, give everyone free music VentureBeat

>> LUCY IN THE SKY WITH OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION: SkyDrive introduces smart files in Windows 8.1, by Mona Akmal: Although it's hard to parse, this Windows blog post describes "smart files" -- a long-established SkyDrive technique that puts thumbnails/metadata of SkyDrive files on your hard drive, instead of replicating the whole file -- and an OCR extractor for SkyDrive-based Camera Roll pictures that extracts text, which is then searchable via Bing. Official Windows blog